Homer

vania Academy of the Fine Arts. Four masterly
marine pieces were painted in 1894, "Storm-
Beaten," "Below Zero/* "High Cliff, Coast of
Maine/' and "Moonlight, Wood Island Light."
For the first-named work the painter received the
gold medal of the Pennsylvania Academy. "High
Cliff, Coast of Maine," is in the National Gal-
lery of Art, Washington. For the purpose of
painting the sea in cold or stormy weather,
Homer had a small portable studio constructed
which could be moved to any point where he
wished to work. Many of his famous marine
pieces were painted from this convenient shel-
ter. The "Northeaster," one of the most impres-
sive of his surf effects, gives the weight and
momentum of a tremendous breaker with unsur-
passed force. It belongs to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. "Cannon Rock"
and "The Maine Coast" also belong to the same
museum. "On a Lee Shore" is in the Rhode
Island School of Design, Providence. It is of
these pictures that Kenyon Cox speaks as the
series which marks Homer as the greatest of
marine painters.

Among the works of 1896 were "The Look-
out—Alps Well," and "The Wreck." In the
former, a moonlight figure piece, one sees a
hardy old seaman intoning his "Airs well!" as
he strikes the hour on the ship's bell. This was
one of the thirty-one Homers bought by Thomas
B. Clarke. It is now in the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston. "The Wreck," showing a life-sav-
ing crew hurrying to the beach with their boat,
was exhibited at Pittsburgh in 1896 and obtained
for its author the first prize of $5,000 with a
gold medal. "Sunset, Saco Bay, the Coming
Storm" was bought by the Lotus Club, New
York Another gold medal came from the Penn-
sylvania Academy. "A Light on the Sea" went
to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington.
The Homers in the Clarke collection were sold
at auction in 1899 for a total of $33,295. A gold
medal was awarded the artist at the Pan-Amer-
ican Exposition at Buffalo. More medals came
from Philadelphia, Charleston, St. Louis. Ready
purchasers snapped up all the marine pictures
available. "Kissing the Moon" was engraved for
the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, "Early Evening"
was added to the collection of Charles L. Freer
of Detroit, and is now in the Freer Gallery in
Washington. The outstanding feature of the
twelfth exhibition of the Carnegie Institute,
Pittsburgh, was a group of twenty-two paintings
by Homer. Half of these works were lent by
museums.

One of the last of Homer's pictures of the
ocean was his "Early Morning after Storm at

Homer

Sea" (1902). It was painted in exactly eight
hours of work, but there were long intervals be-
tween the four sessions devoted to it. A transient
effect of light, which did not last long enough to
permit the painter to carry it to a finish at one
time, was the effect sought. This work, some
years later, brought about $40,000.

It was in the midst of a swelling tide of popu-
larity and success that Winslow Homer died in
1910, at the age of seventy-four. His body was
cremated and the ashes were laid in Mount
Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass., near the
home of his boyhood. The art museums of Bos-
ton and New York opened memorial exhibitions
of his works in the winter of 1911. The Metro-
politan Museum bought from the estate a set of
twelve superb watercolors, subjects from the Ba-
hamas, Bermuda, and Florida, doubtless among
the finest things that Homer ever produced. His
pictures are in almost every art museum in
America today, and so keen is the competition
for them that the prices have mounted by leaps
and bounds from year to year, reaching the high
record for American paintings.

Homer's method and style were those of a man
who had something to say and who employed no
rhetoric, but drove straight to the mark. He
cared little for what had gone before him, and
he echoed no painter living or dead. As a con-
tribution to the art of painting in America his
cewvre stands alone and unequaled. It is wholly
personal and American. There is no trace of
foreign influence. His work is racy of the soil;
even its blemishes are national. It is virile, con-
cise, pungent; it abounds in the "unexpectedness
of the usual." Although it deals in realities it is
not prosaic. On the contrary, it contains those
essential elements of poetry, deep feeling, and
noble form, to which is added in many instances
the charm of rhythm. The singular beauty and
dignity of many of his compositions, seemingly
due to instinct rather than deliberate plan, are
salient qualities of his work which more than
anything else give the aspect of unforgettable
pictorial authority and weight to his master-
pieces.

As a painter of the sea he is preeminent. There
have been many able painters of marine pictures,
but no one approaches Homer. The sheer might
of the ocean when a great storm stirs it to fury
had never been adequately pictured before his
time. Added to this impressive spectacle of the
elements in violent commotion, the human inter-
est supplied by the figures of sailors, fishermen,
and coast-guards, pitting their courage, skill, and
intelligence against the forces of nature, and
confronting danger and death with the calm

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